Connecting to the Sound Clippy Board

[mm]

The [mm] object is what communicates between the Sound Clippy (or Arduino) board and Pd. Once connected to the [mm] object the Sound Clippy board sends data over a serial port connection about the state of its inputs.

Connecting

To connect the [mm] object to the Sound Clippy board connect a USB cable between the board and the computer. Open an example such as simple-synth.pd from the sound-clippy folder in the modular-muse library or create a new patch and add the [mm] object to it.

Click on the “list” button. This asks Pd to list all the serial ports it sees. The list is printed out to the Pd window. Here is my Pd window after clicking “list”:

Note: this will look different on different operating systems (this is from a Mac).

The serial port with the “usbserial” in it is the Arduino. In this case it is on port 4. If you’re not sure which one is the Arduino, try unplugging the USB cable from the device, click list, plug it back in, and click list again. You should see a port which is not in the list when unplugged and is in the list when plugged – this is the one you want!

Back in the [mm] object I change the “port” number box to 4. It should connect to the board with a corresponding “opened serial line device #” message in the Pd window.

You should now be able to use the [mm-digital] and [mm-analog] objects to read the inputs from the board. For more on using these see Mapping Inputs.